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Quebec seniors home employee mourns loss of fire victims

Residence was wonderful place to work and live, horror-struck woman says

Nicole Bélanger was an attendant at Résidence du Havre, the seniors home in L'Isle-Verte, Que., that burned down early Thursday. She lives just across the street and knew everyone who lived in the building. (Randy Risling / Toronto Star)

Emergency workers continue the search on Saturday for victims of the deadly fire early Thursday morning at the seniors home in L'Isle-Verte, Que. (Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

L’ISLE-VERTE, QUEBEC—Nicole Bélanger runs a weary finger down the list of those who lived at the Quebec seniors home that lies now in icy ruins.

“This woman here was blind and died — it would have taken someone to get her out,” she says of 99-year-old Adrienne Bérubé. “Madame Vivianne is dead, Madame St-Pierre is dead, Madame Plourde — she was a nice woman. Madame Lucienne Thériault, she was in a wheelchair and couldn’t walk. . . ”

The thermostat in Bélanger’s home, 200 metres from the Résidence du Havre where she works as a part-time attendant, reads 28.5 C.

It’s been that high since Thursday morning to ward off the shivers from the shock that overtook when she realized so many had died.

“They’re my friends. I loved them all,” she said.

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Bélanger and more than two dozen other employees are left to mourn the losses incurred in the fire at the L’Isle-Verte seniors home. They are without explanation and without words, but filled with haunting memories of the victims.

The first telephone call came at 6 a.m. that morning from broadcaster Radio-Canada, which she let go to her answering machine. A call from a Quebec radio station an hour later didn’t raise any suspicions.

But when her son called next from Chicoutimi, frantic for news of his mother, she finally realized the source of the strange puffs of smoke that had been drifting through her living room window when she awoke twice during the night to feed her wood stove.“I opened the television and I saw the building on fire. I didn’t believe it.”

She still can’t, despite venturing out with a colleague just once on Friday to see what had happened with her own eyes.

“It was my workplace, but it was also my second home. I went in and quickly started to smile even if I didn’t necessarily feel like working in the morning.”

The 52-unit residence was a wonderful place to work, for the nearly 30 employees, as well as a wonderful place to live, Bélanger said. Roch Bernier, the director of the home, never let repairs linger. It was clean. Activities were stimulating. Such a nice place, in fact, that co-owner Irène Plante lived in the newer half of the building, the wing that was relatively undamaged by the flames and smoke.

It is the community lost in the fire that is being mourned just as much as the 32 individuals who were nearing the end of their long lives and the building they called home.

“There have been losses, people who have died since I’ve been there. There have been many. . . But this, 32 people all at the same time, it’s hell,” Bélanger said.

It’s a nightmare she understands intimately, having lost her own family home in nearby Trois-Pistoles at the age of 5.

“My father was at church and it started in the roof. My mother had just given birth to a baby girl two weeks earlier. It was a long time ago, in 1956,” she said. “After that, you are left with a fear of fire. You are marked. I was young and I was marked. . . We saw the fire. We saw the house burn. It was completely destroyed.”

It was a horror that Bélanger never wanted to witness again. Tucked away in her house as the place and the people she loved burned, she didn’t have to.

“I believe strongly in destiny, and maybe it was destined that I didn’t see it.”

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